How to Build & Implement Systems to Grow Your Business w/ Francis Pedraza | EP #106

In this episode, Peter and Francis discuss the making of Invisible Technologies, how leadership philosophies can change the outcome, and worldwide talent acquisition. 03:34 | The Rise of Invisible Companies 24:59 | A Fairer Model for Companies 54:40 | Essential Books for Entrepreneurs Francis Pedraza is an entrepreneur and thought leader, best known as the co-founder and CEO of Invisible Technologies, which leverages human and artificial intelligence to provide scalable business solutions. Under his leadership, Invisible has raised significant funding ($6.6M) with an annual revenue of $336M. Before Invisible, he held internships at Google, served as an advisor at Numeria, and founded Everest, a startup focused on helping people achieve their personal goals through social network platforms. Learn more about Invisible here: https://www.invisible.co/ ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6 I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:00Peter Diamandis?

  You've taken a completely different strategy than most entrepreneurs.

• 1:04Speaker 04

  I think this will create a new era in entrepreneurship.

• 1:10Speaker 04

  The world is run by these 20th century services giants. And for whatever reason, venture capitalists, Silicon Valley, the technology industry is not counterpositioning against them.

• 1:22Peter Diamandis?

  If you're getting ready to start your company, if you're the CEO of an existing company, if you're looking at scaling, I want you to hear what Francis has to say because it will have you pause on what you're doing and look at your company and your vision and your plan in a completely different way.

• 1:40Speaker 04

  Do you have a company culture where the resolve, the commitments and the mission is so high that if everyone had to enter ramen mode if you couldn't pay them and they just had to go on the equity and you were just giving them stock, the stock that you would otherwise give investors, how many people at your team would stay?

• 2:00Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome to Moonshots. We're about to dive into an extraordinary conversation with Francis Pedraza. He is the CEO of Invisible Technologies. Invisible has gone from near zero revenue to almost $300 million in just four years. An extraordinary growth. And Francis's customers, none other than OpenAI, the top banks, DoorDash, extraordinary companies that are using Invisible to help scale their processes. If you're at the beginning of your journey and you want a mechanism to operationalize, use AI, use automation, Invisible is the company for you. But what we're going to be discussing here is Francis's philosophy as a founder/CEO, the decisions he

• 2:45Peter Diamandis?

  made on where to raise capital and not raise capital, how to hire amazing people and make them partners. This is a masterclass on a different way of being an entrepreneur and succeeding in the process at extraordinary speed. Please take notes, listen up. Excited for you to use these approaches in your Moonshots. All right, let's dive into Francis Pedraza, the CEO of Invisible Technologies. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with a friend now for the last 15 years, Francis Pedraza. Francis, good to see you, buddy.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  Peter, thanks for taking the time.

• 3:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we're in for a conversation around a different level of entrepreneurship. I think a masterclass in being a moonshot entrepreneur. And if you're getting ready to start your company, if you're the CEO of an existing company, if you're looking at scaling, I want you to hear what Francis has to say, because it will have you pause on what you're doing and look at your company and your vision and your plan in a completely different way. Now, Francis, I hope I'm not overpromising here, but I love what you're doing. And you've taken a completely different strategy than most entrepreneurs. And perhaps it has to do with your background

• 4:06Peter Diamandis?

  as a philosopher. I'm going to call you not a philosopher king, but a philosopher entrepreneur. Let's kick it off first with

• 4:15Peter Diamandis?

  At the top level, what is invisible? And then I want to dive into how it's different, how your philosophy of building this moonshot company is different than most everybody else out there and the lessons you've learned. Cause they're worth writing down if you're taking notes during this podcast. So kick it off, tell us about what invisible is.

• 4:36Speaker 04

  Invisible is operations as a service. So we make it easy for, for companies to delegate core business processes that they use to run their business. And the biggest company in the world that does this is Accenture. They have almost a million people, Peter. They're a third the size of the US military, which is the biggest organization on the planet. And they do $63 billion of annual revenue and the industry is called business process outsourcing, BPO, business process outsourcing. And Accenture is not a, a technology company. They do not run all of their operations on a single platform and they bill by the hour.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  So their incentive is to, to bill as many hours as possible without getting fired. And, and so they're the blockbuster that we're trying to Netflix. They're the Lockheed Martin that we're trying to SpaceX. And there's a three-pronged disruption. The first is pricing. We do results-based or value-based pricing wherever we can. So I'll tell you some examples, you know, insurance company came to us, was our, one of our first big clients. And they said, hey, can you run our claims processing? Can you run underwriting checks? It was price per claim process, price per check passed. Then DoorDash came to us during the pandemic and had said, hey, can you digitize every restaurant menu in the United States and help us launch in Germany and Japan? And it was a price per menu digitized.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  And OpenAI came to us the beginning of 2022 saying, hey, you know, we have swallowed the entire internet, but GPT is hallucinating. How do we improve quality? And we came up with ways of hiring PhDs and masters to train GPT to do that. And it was a price per your conversation train. And, and there's, that alignment of incentives means that better, faster and cheaper is good. It's in everybody's interest. It's a win-win. And that creates the, the alignment with the client and the alignment with technology itself. And then the second prong of disruption is technology. So reusable processes are our reusable rockets.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  So SpaceX was able to disrupt Lockheed Martin because Lockheed Martin was billing, you know, cost plus, and so their incentive was to just bill NASA and the Air Force a ton of hours. And SpaceX said, what if we charge for the launch itself and price per launch, results-based pricing? And they then had to vertically integrate. And I just toured, you know, in LA. They have 38 hangar bays and they're actually manufacturing starships in Los Angeles. And that approach, you know, gave them a series of technological advantages. We have built a similar thing. We call it our digital assembly line. So you've got to imagine Henry Ford about 100 years ago was thinking about how to do

• 7:29Speaker 04

  mass production to make the first automotives. And that is the same approach we're doing for knowledge work. So we break down our clients' processes into steps like Legos. And we've integrated 300 third-party AI and automation tools into a process builder. So when we take our clients' processes and we break them into these steps, we can automate as much of those processes as possible with all the tools that are out there. We have our own AI and automation team, but you can't automate every single step in a process. To do complex work, you've got to be able to plug in humans to do the stuff computers still can't do.

• 8:10Speaker 04

  So we have over 3,000 people now in over 100 countries around the world, including PhDs and masters, that we can plug in to do the remaining steps. And that allows us to deliver an end-to-end solution that is like ops as a service. And that's the technology advantage. And then the final advantage, Peter, is culture. That's the third prong of the disruption, which is that we're 70% owned by our team. And so in our company culture, we don't act like employees. We act like partners, and we call each other partners. And at the end of every month, we're looking at the income statement, the balance sheet, the cash flows. Everyone is, you know, able to ask each other, what's the strategy? You know, what's the ROI? How do we do better?

• 8:52Speaker 04

  And that creates a kind of sense of urgency about how to move the needle on the stock price, how to make the company better all the time. And that that sense of camaraderie is often missing in mega corporations. So it's a rebel alliance culture versus the galactic empire of like 20th century services companies.

• 9:13Peter Diamandis?

  I love it and it's been extraordinary growth, right? You started the company in 2015, is that correct?

• 9:20Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 9:21Peter Diamandis?

  I've known you for a bit of time and it wasn't really, I mean, you iterated a little bit and it's been, you hit a formula that's been extraordinarily successful. When did you hit that stride, do you think?

• 9:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, one of the things I, one of the reasons I trust you so much, Peter, is that, you know, your loyalty saw me through my first business failure. I started a company right out of college. You were an advisor to it. It was called Everest and we had a half a million people download it. It was an iPhone app to help people achieve personal goals. Apple featured it a lot. It was a beautiful, pure software product, but it didn't have, you know, a business model that was profitable. And so the company ultimately failed and I learned a lesson. And then I started Invisible. And the first version of Invisible, there was a ton of clients and they were willing to pay us a lot, but we weren't able to supply that demand efficiently. And so that version failed and I had to, we had to evolve through that.

• 10:15Speaker 04

  And then we built the first version of the digital assembly line. We relaunched, you know, in 2017 with that. And then we had our first small businesses as clients and we got our first medium sized businesses as clients. We got our first enterprise contract in January 2020 with DoorDash. And, and then, you know, at that point, you know, I was, I don't know how old I was at the time, maybe 30 years old, right? So I'd been through a decade of pain, you know, of, of the, you know, I call it the journey through hell. It really is a test of faith. And, and then since then, since January 2020, we grew from a one mill run rate to about a three mill run rate that year. We grew from a three mill run rate to about a 10 mill run rate the following year.

• 11:00Speaker 04

  We grew from that to a 25 mill run rate the following year, then 100 mill run rate the end of last year. And we're shooting for 200 by June next month. And by the end of the year, we could be at 300. So that is just-

• 11:12Peter Diamandis?

  Epic.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  It is kind of deeply humbling and to see, first of all, it's several things, right? I personally, and I don't think anyone at the company would say, you know, we did this through, you know, our own genius and our own strength. I think that that's the sort of hubris and arrogance that gets you punished, right? But certainly, there was a ton of perseverance and team building and great values that went into it. There was also, when you have a strong strategic thesis that you've worked out, you know, in writing, and you've asked the smartest minds you know to tear it apart, and you know all the ways in which it might not be true, but you still take a big bet,

• 11:57Speaker 04

  it's incredible to see when you're right, how right you can be and how that plays out. And then there is this element of luck, which is kind of miraculous. Like, some of our biggest clients came to us through seemingly random circumstances. There was one story where, you know, I went through a breakup. I was staying in a friend's, with a friend, and in there, in his guest room, and then the next person, he ended up listening to me on Zoom calls and investing, and then the next person who stayed in that guest room was a product manager at OpenAI, and then became a client. So, those things, nobody can take credit for it. They're miraculous, but then what do you do with the luck? You know, are you prepared? Are you prepared for it?

• 12:42Peter Diamandis?

  First of all, I think any entrepreneur listening to this is saying, wow, I mean, that is epic growth. I mean, you hit your stride in the 2020, and this last four years has been extraordinary. And I want to break it down. I want to talk about what Invisible does, because it's an amazing asset for companies out there. But I think the lessons that you can teach are really what I want to deliver to this community here.

• 13:12Peter Diamandis?

  A lot of them. So let's, let's begin with number one, capitalizing company. You have a different philosophy on raising money. I mean, most, you know, listen, I'm in the venture capital business through Bold and Expendable Ventures, and I have raised a ton of money. But my experience in a lot of the big companies that I've gone out to raise money for is I raise capital, raise capital, raise capital, and I end up with, you know, single-digit percent of the company I started and owned 100% of. And it's, it's brutal at the end of that. There's one exception with one company that I just, you know, I

• 13:52Peter Diamandis?

  maintained 100% and I built it based upon revenue. It's like sold, sold first and then built based upon the revenue I had. Can you talk about your philosophy on, on raising capital and what you've done with Invisible?

• 14:07Speaker 04

  We call our philosophy the sovereignty game. And it's the venture game versus the sovereignty game. So the venture game, which most people in Silicon Valley are familiar with, is you raise a, a Series A, then a Series B, then a Series C, and you try to IPO or sell the company in five to eight years. And, and with all that capital, you try to grow as fast as possible. You're losing money to grow and take market share, and it's a winner-take-all strategy. And your favorite website is techcrunch.com. And you're, you're, and the, the company culture is very caffeinated, right? It's like, how do we do this as quickly as possible? And you're, you're shooting for this big exit. And you know that if you don't raise the next round, you might actually go bust because

• 14:52Speaker 04

  it's a loss-making company. So it's very fragile. You, you, you really need to, to kind of, you know, get very lucky. You're, you're, you're dependent on capital markets to, to agree with you. And you pretty quickly lose control of your board, because these people writing big checks are taking board seats. And so usually by the Series A or B, you no longer have real control of your company. That's the venture game. The sovereignty game is Raise as little capital as possible to get to profitability at scale. We call that escape velocity. And escape velocity has different levels. So level negative one, you're losing money, you're burning money. Zero is break even. One is you're making money, but not enough money to really optimally reinvest in the company.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  Level two is you're making enough money to optimally reinvest in the company and it's compounding and growing. Level three is you're generating capital, but not enough to allocate meaningfully. And level four is you actually are now generating enough capital to allocate. You're a capital allocator and you're compounding. And the time horizon is very long in the sovereignty game. You're shooting for 20 plus years. And, and, and so because you, you've done it capital efficiently, in our case, we, with $6 million in six years, we got to an $11 million revenue run rate, generating a million dollars of profit. And after that, we were able to just use that profit to keep growing the business. And we're now at 25% EBITDA margins.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  So we're shooting for, you know, at least a 60 million EBITDA exit run rate for the year, if not higher. So that, that means that we're, you know, and next year, if we hit our targets, we'll generate over 100 million of EBITDA. So we're, we're making a lot of profit per month. And that allows us to fuel innovation in the business, to reinvest in the business, to start new companies, to invest in companies, and someday it allows to buy companies. And that's what, what capital allocators do. There's eight buckets in, in capital allocation. You can either keep the cash on balance sheet as insurance for a rainy day. You can pay off any debt that you've raised. You can reinvest in your business. You can start new businesses. You can invest in businesses. You can buy businesses.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  You can do buybacks or dividends. And those are the eight buckets. And, and so the sovereignty game ends up with a very different exit mechanism. So there's five ways equity turns into money. Equity turns into money through an IPO, through an M and A, through a dividend, through a buyback, or through a secondary. The first two are associated with the venture game, IPO and M and A. Sell the company or IPO the company. The other three are associated with the sovereignty game. Either buy back stock, the company is buying back stock from shareholders.

• 17:39Peter Diamandis?

  This is what SpaceX is doing, right?

• 17:41Speaker 04

  Right, or secondary, find new investors that want to own shares in the company and you're facilitating a transaction, so one of your shareholders is selling to a new shareholder. And so it's just, you know, transfer of wealth between shareholders. And then the third is dividend, the company is generating profits and dividend some of it back to shareholders. Now, it's interesting, capitalism would be less efficient with any one of the five mechanisms. But shareholder capitalism would break without dividends. Like, you know, it becomes illogical to have shareholder capitalism if there's not some mechanism of taking profits and distributing them to shareholders. That's what makes companies, that's what gives them their intrinsic value, their intrinsic financial value.

• 18:23Speaker 04

  And so we are building for that sort of an outcome. We've already done, we raised eight million of primary, we've done 20 million of buybacks so far. We are about to do another 15 of buybacks and we're working on a $50 million secondary. And so over time, that's our scorecard for realized returns and we're going to realize more and more returns through buybacks and secondaries. And then probably, you know, over the next five to 15 years, we might shrink the number of shares by 25 to 50% through buybacks. And then at some point we'll just dividend and that will be the ultimate return for the company. But the unrealized return is the inherent value of the business over time.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  And so in the sovereignty game, you really have to think through defensibility of the business. So if your time horizon is longer, how do you know that the business is even going to be around in 10 years? You need a moat and there's a whole theory for how to build a moat around a company. And that's the sovereignty game.

• 19:24Peter Diamandis?

  Take me back to the beginning of this company, you had exited Everest, it didn't work out.

• 19:32Peter Diamandis?

  And you, what was the inception of Invisible? And then, how did you early capitalize it? What was your, did you dive back in to raise capital for a new, you know, ten-page business plan?

• 19:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, necessity is the mother of invention. I, you know, had raised some angel capital for Everest and, you know, I was blessed with the generosity of these individuals. But when you raise money from individuals, it's their money. And so it really hurts to lose it. And so we had raised almost three million dollars for Everest. And it was from people that I really admired, like Peter Thiel, Bono from U2 invested, and other great, great individuals. And I lost their money. And I had to write them, I had to write them a letter and say, I'm sorry, you know, I tried my absolute best and the company failed. And so when I started this company, the second time around, I still was very much kind of brainwashed by, you know, our sort of like peer pressure,

• 20:32Speaker 04

  sort of the collective mindset.

• 20:33Peter Diamandis?

  It's the thing you do.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's the thing you do. And the thing is that I got much better at fundraising. And so my decks were better, my pitch was better. And people still didn't want to invest. And it was not because they didn't want to invest in me because my first company failed. That was not an issue. We were able to raise angel money again pretty quickly. But it was because it was a services company. And so I ended up realizing that there was a belief, a dogmatic belief in my opinion, that the institutional investors, the venture capitalists had, that you could not build a true technology company that was a services company. And what they wanted to invest in was SaaS, was software as a service.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  Because software companies that just sell software, they have almost like 92% margins, very high margins, and they're very scalable. And so the assumption was, this would be a low-margin business. It would not be scalable. And you wouldn't be able to build a moat around it. And so as a result, I had to take that feedback really seriously, Peter. And the act of fundraising was actually helpful in getting that feedback from smart people. And I had to think, first of all, if I'm gonna, if they're gonna, if the capital markets are gonna disagree with me, how do I fund the business? And, and then, why do I think I'm right?

• 22:03Speaker 04

  And, and, and then if I am right, then I'm really right, because it's not just Accenture, it's McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Ernst & Young, KPMG, Deloitte, PWC, WPP, Omnicom, Publicis. The world is run by these 20th century services giants. And for whatever reason, venture capitalists, Silicon Valley, the technology industry is not counter positioning against them. There, there, there's no rebel alliance against that galactic empire. There's no, they're, they're not being disrupted. Silicon Valley is just mass producing tools. There's an app for everything, so why isn't everything perfect yet? And, and, and Invisible's whole idea was customers don't really wanna buy more software.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  They don't really want to, you know, figure out how to use more tools in their business. They just want operations to run. It's complex. They want someone else to do that for them. They want someone else to like, run all these apps, stitch them all together, and, and deliver the outcome. And so, I had to, you know, get really confident that I was right. And then I had to solve the, okay, well now what do I do? How do I finance it? And that's when the backward planning began, where it's like, okay, how much money do I need to get to profitability? Because once I'm profitable, I don't need anyone else's money. And that's when it was like, okay, $6 million. All right, that's something I can work with. And so, that's probably something, I'm not gonna raise all at once. I'm probably gonna raise it one check at a time.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  And I'm gonna go to angel investors and I'm gonna, you know, tell, tell them the, the story. And maybe I'm gonna find a few contrarian institutional investors and get lucky. And we were able to find those people. About, little more than half our money came from angels, and then the rest came from some seed stage investors.

• 23:48Peter Diamandis?

  How much should you bring in at that point?

• 23:50Speaker 04

  And it was not all at once. So there was like an initial 500K and then there was another about 500K from angels and then there was 3 million that came from some seed investors. And then, and then the, then there was a weird million dollar round that half of it came from insiders and half from outsiders. And then there was a final million at the very end, over, over a span of years. But the other way that I raised money, Peter, was actually I raised money from my own team. What, not actually through them investing and writing a check, but because I gave them my equity. I created a partnership and we

• 24:32Speaker 04

  created a partner pay model with different tiers and tier one would, you know, would get a certain amount of equity every year and tier two would get a certain amount of equity and tier three we get a certain equity, et cetera. And I convinced everyone who joined the company to take a huge discount to whatever their market rate was. So, you know, if they were previously making $200,000 a year, I got people to take even, you know, 50 or 70K a year in order to value the equity. Now, this was an instant filter. The vast majority of people were not interested in taking a huge bet on the equity. But when I explained it to some people, they're like, wow, this is very, very generous. If this works, this equity is going to be worth millions. And today it is. And those people are happy they

• 25:17Speaker 04

  did the trade. And so there was a period of time when, you know, I was paying, like basically everyone was, was in full ramen noodle mode. We were paying each other like a thousand dollars a month, you know, that was the, that was the average salary of an invisible partner. But even to this day, when we're paying closer and closer to market, equity is still the biggest portion of compensation. Our philosophy is there's cash, you know, your, your salary for, for short-term alignment, bonuses and performance milestone pay for medium-term, you know, every six months, we do a big bonus round. And then there's equity, that's the real wealth building exercise of the company.

• 25:58Peter Diamandis?

  Do you think this structure can work for any company out there? Software, services, medical, educational, is this something that can, I mean, it seems like you're aligning interests in an extraordinary fashion.

• 26:14Peter Diamandis?

  And and people are thereby doing what they think is is best for the company. Everybody's everybody has a say in its success.

• 26:25Speaker 04

  In any company in which the alpha is coming from labor, not capital, then this model can and should work and will be deployed and and someone will disrupt that industry. Then the question is, you know, how many how many situations is it purely about capital and not about labor? And while I I'm sure there are some, I think labor is becoming more important, not less important. And the assumption has been that actually it's capital that should own most of the stock in the company. And labor should maybe own ten or twenty percent of the business and capital should own eighty percent. Right? And and my my realization over time was, wait a second.

• 27:08Speaker 04

  You know, my partners are the best investors I have because they are the people in the business thinking about how to upgrade the business. And yet they're thinking like shareholders. They're they're reading. And we did these finance one on one classes where we like teach everyone. Here's how an income statement works. Here's how a balance sheet works. Here's how cash flow works. But it forces to be really transparent and and actually it created a kind of internal accountability where it's like, you know, I had to I had to answer tough questions. What's our, you know, twelve month plan? What's our long term plan? You know, what how are we going to fix these problems in the business model? And it created that sort of internal culture. And we call it a an owner operator or an ownership culture. We call each other partners, not not not employees.

• 27:51Peter Diamandis?

  I love that.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  Pretty much any any services business, certainly. But then, you know, why why aren't most venture backed businesses like this? And I think the assumption is, well, you know, it the software is doing most of the work. The people are kind of commodities. What really matters is having the capital to scale it. But actually, like, I think most of the time it's because the board doesn't want to share the pie. And and and this is where, you know, you know me, I'm a capitalist. I I sound a little bit like, you know, I'm not right now. But I think it's possible to be both a revolutionary and a good fiduciary. And and and and it's through this alignment of incentives around around equity value creation.

• 28:35Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day where you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, "Listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on." And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look, we don't find out.

• 29:18Peter Diamandis?

  So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full-body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a GRAIL blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning, when it's solvable. You're gonna find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics.

• 30:02Peter Diamandis?

  We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life, and we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com/peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends.

• 30:42Peter Diamandis?

  It's a chance to really add decades on to our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. At every entrepreneur, at early stages during an entrepreneurial journey, an entrepreneur's gonna have to figure out how much money they're gonna raise. And there is this tendency to say, listen, I'm going to raise more than I think I need because I want the cushion. I want the money in case things turn down or things don't work out.

• 31:20Peter Diamandis?

  How do you think about that? You know, I think one of the most important things is living long enough to live forever. It's how, it's like getting to, getting to profitability as soon as you can. And then being able to have control of your own fate. But I know of companies, I've been inside of ventures where it's like, you know, we, we need 20 million, but let's read, let's raise 40 just to have the extra cushion. You didn't fall into that trap.

• 31:48Speaker 04

  No. Sun Tzu said, don't worry about victory. Remove the possibility of defeat. And then afterwards, look for victory. And we, we used to talk about bunker mode. Sometimes people call it cockroach mode. Like, you know, can, do you have a, a company culture where the resolve, the commitment to the mission is so high? That, you know, if, if anyone, if everyone had to enter ramen mode, if you couldn't pay them and they just had to go on the equity and you were just giving them stock, the stock that you would otherwise give investors. You know, how many people at your team would stay? How many people would, would, would keep going and keep working towards the mission? In the early days, that was 100% of our company.

• 32:33Speaker 04

  Today, it's less than 100%. Maybe it's only 10 or 20% of our company. It's an abnormally large percentage of our company that still has that company culture. But I think that the, the, the capital scarcity is a form of forcing you to become efficient, right? Like when, when you can't solve problems by hiring people and you can't solve problems by throwing money at the problem. You actually have to innovate your way through the problem. And, and so you end up changing your relationship to the adversity or the scarcity that is the capital scarcity.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  And, and the, the.

• 33:21Speaker 04

  You end up increasing productivity per person, right? It goes up and up and up and up. And it might start really slowly. You might not even see that it's happening. But over time, you look back and you realize, wow, you know, like, we thought we needed so much capital, but we didn't because we ended up solving all these problems along the way and having these bright ideas. We wouldn't have had those bright ideas if our backs weren't up against a wall, so to speak.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  And this is something they teach in martial arts and also in a lot of philosophical traditions, to sort of love your enemy, you know? Because your enemy is teaching you. And the enemy here is capital scarcity. You're like, oh, I don't have enough money. And you can be in this very negative mindset about it, but it actually can be the greatest gift to your creative process at the company.

• 34:11Peter Diamandis?

  Talk to me a second. I'm not going to go into hiring and the type of employees, but before we get there, talk about span of control and empowering individual employees to solve problems versus have, you know, large organizational structures and span of control and such.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  So I ended up realizing my span was larger than I thought it was. The traditional span of control is like, you don't want to exceed 12. You don't want to have 12 people working for you. Anything more than that is like unmanageable. And actually, the sweet spot is usually three to seven. And anything above seven is like danger zone and anything above 12 is impossible, something's wrong.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  But if you have less than three people working for you, then there's not enough. And in the creation of a hierarchy, this sort of creates some rules of thumb. Those rules of thumb are true

• 35:09Speaker 04

  if you're operating in what I call an army mindset. If you're operating in a special forces mindset, you know, you can sort of do these very strange...

• 35:24Speaker 04

  Dances. So, for example, we hired a CEO, Ben. He started about 18 months ago. And at one point, he had a span of control of 17. And I was cool with it because I felt like he was such a capable manager that he was actually able to empower that many people. There was a medium-term strategy to hire some key people that would have, that are actually now condensing the span of control. So his span of control is rationalizing now. But for this sprint, this particular period of time, he was capable and it was necessary

• 36:05Speaker 04

  to do that. And, and why was it, why was it possible? It was possible because I had a dotted line to most of those people, and I was co-managing, and I was helping him manage it. And we also were able to surround ourselves with the right advisors and board members that were helping him. And there were enough veterans in the business that their veterancy was able to sort of upgrade the new people we were hiring pretty fast. And so it held together. And so I think that in an army mindset, you kind of look for a job description with clear checkboxes, and you're done, you're done when you're done

• 36:45Speaker 04

  checking those boxes. But in more of a special forces mindset, everyone is capable of doing more than they think they can. And the, the combinations, the ways that which, in which you can combine people, it's much more like soccer than baseball, right? It's much more fluid. And, and, and you can only move into that fluidity when everyone is really committed to excellence and everyone is in an open-minded state. But I just think that, that

• 37:14Peter Diamandis?

  I want to go someplace different with this because I, I think the kind of company you've been building is one in which

• 37:21Peter Diamandis?

  So backing up a second, going to a company like Lockheed, I remember reading about Lockheed's Gunkworks and the way it worked, the level of agility was such that in the center of the massive hangar when they were building their aircraft, they had a single blueprint and anyone could go and make a change to that blueprint. They were empowered to do that, but they had to write their name next to the change. In other words, as long as they felt were clear and responsible, they didn't have to go through layers of approvals to go and make that edit. So how do you create a culture in which because you've

• 38:04Peter Diamandis?

  got owner partners and people care deeply about it, that there isn't layers of red tape to encourage people to optimize and solve, right? Because when you have so much structure and you have all these approval processes, you crush an organization's agility. Do you agree with that?

• 38:30Speaker 04

  I totally agree with that. One is just shifting the emphasis from sins of omission to sins of commission to sins of omission, right? So you're less going to get punished for making mistakes and you're more going to get punished for not doing stuff. And so one way to see if a company is becoming more political, which we have to fight against right now, is people are afraid of putting their name on things. You talked about, you know, putting your name on the blueprint, but even putting your name on an email and writing an email and saying, for example, I woke up this morning, somebody on the team said, you know, who's, he said, "We don't have a day one mindset on this part of our

• 39:11Speaker 04

  sales team." And he listed out a whole bunch of problems and he had escalated it. And he could have, you know, by causing a stink... You know, maybe you're you're you're putting yourself at risk, maybe you're putting your job at risk. We really don't punish that, we reward that. That's somebody who's taking ownership and responsibility and and and and calling calling out a problem. So I think we just generally reward people who take on more responsibility and who are willing to identify problems. And not just identify problems, but suggest solutions and give the solutions a try. Even when the solutions don't work, I'd rather have that

• 39:54Speaker 04

  person who's taking risks running things than the person who's not taking risks. And it's the person who's not saying stuff, who's quiet, who doesn't put their neck out there. That's the person who's like basically bureaucratic and political and and and probably just a follower.

• 40:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Hiring people, how do you hire people? How do you find them? You you said you have three thousand individuals now as part of the team. That's that's crazy. It's crazy. It's amazing. How do you? Talk about culture and hiring and and what your thoughts are. What have you learned there?

• 40:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, we've learned a lot of things. The structure of the organization is we have partners at the top and they have equity in the business. We started the year with about one hundred and twenty partners. We're going to end the year with nearly three hundred. So, you know, we're more than doubling headcount this year, which is very scary. In in the sense that it's a test of the culture if the veterans can bring in the new people.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  And and then there's specialists. The specialists are partners in training and they they haven't made partner yet. They don't have equity yet, but they're they're working on both the partners and the specialists are building the company. And then the agents are are doing the work for the clients on the digital assembly line. And that could be advanced AI training work. It could be building spreadsheets. It could be running insurance claims. It could be any form of work that our clients need. And these are contractors. And they're in over a hundred countries around the world. And the ability to scalably hire people, train them, manage them, route, you know, they they can sort of set up their shift schedule. And then our system will automatically route them work that they're qualified to do.

• 41:39Speaker 04

  And we create an interface for them to do it. And we we we have a quality system to check the work. And then they get paid in their local currency. Some of them get paid in Bitcoin. And that. And so those are the contractors. Amazingly, even in the contractor, you know, even in the agent workforce that we have, the companies, the partnerships values have spread down. And so I'd say actually, a lot of our agents have that partner ethos, even though they're not partner yet. And a lot of them dream of becoming a partner someday. And we try to create paths for them upwards. The, you know, we'll be at probably over 5,000 by the end of the year, Peter, just to give you a sense of how the organization is growing quickly.

• 42:24Speaker 04

  When you count the agents. But the the partners are the ones I really watch. And and one of the key evolutions that I'm thinking about now is in the early days, it was possible for a new partner to earn more than 1% of invisible. Now, you know, if we hit our targets over the next five years, 1% of invisible, we were worth $100 million. And so people are chasing basis points. And you have people that are, you know, shooting to earn 10 basis points because they believe that'll be worth $10 million in five years. It's a life changing amount of money.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  I worry that that would change the shareholder investor, you know, invest owner operator, the investor operator culture that we have. So far, it's holding. And I'm, I'm, every time I meet a new partner, I'm thinking in the back of my mind, does this person think like an entrepreneur? Do they take risks? Can they understand how one puzzle piece of the tactics they're working on in a day to day business, a day to day basis, fit into the overall strategic puzzle of the business? Do they understand the strategy? And so far, I'm, I'm incredibly like blown away. And and I think the secret has been, Peter, we built a hiring team as if it was its own separate business.

• 43:51Speaker 04

  So if invisible is operations as a service, our hiring team is hiring as a service. And, you know, this, the head of hiring, Mark Gray, is this half Turkish, half Irish guy who lives in Copenhagen. He married a Danish lady. And he had been a scale up head of hiring. And we gave him an opportunity to say, hey, come here. You'll be our head of hiring. But instead of just running a cost center. We're gonna treat you like you're a CEO. And we're gonna give you an actual path to become a CEO of your own business. And your first client will be Invisible. And Invisible needs a hiring factory that can produce higher and higher quantity and

• 44:35Speaker 04

  higher and higher quality of all these types of people. We need to do everything from hiring engineers, to hiring executives, to hiring managers, to hiring agents who do work for clients that are operational. And we need to do all of that. That is a full agency effectively that we need to build. And so the only way to do it is through incredible amounts of automation and innovation. And you need to have your small team not think like they're a small part of a big thing, but think like they're a big part of a small thing. Can you do it? And he was up for the mission. He was the most entrepreneurial person we interviewed. I turned down five other candidates. Because I knew that a good head of hiring is a good hire that makes good hires. It's like an extra good hire.

• 45:19Speaker 04

  And a bad head of hiring is like a bad hire that makes bad hires. And you tank your culture. So when we hired Mark Gray, it really was a huge piece of leverage for the company. Last year, we had over 100,000 people apply. We only hired 1,000. And so that's like 1%. And our cost per hiring an agent was only $87. And our cost for hiring a partner was about 150. And we were able to do that because they automated so much of the outbound and of the full, in our applicant tracking system, Greenhouse, they automated like every single process in Greenhouse. And they used a bunch of psyche valves to like basically, you know, use data from all the interviews that we were getting and use that to accelerate the process.

• 46:02Peter Diamandis?

  My friend, you have opened up 1,000 conversational doors here in just the last two minutes. I mean, so first of all, you've built a completely virtualized organization with individuals in how many countries?

• 46:16Speaker 04

  Over 100. I can't contract. It was 96 when we were at Abundance 360 and it's over 100 now.

• 46:21Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing, amazing. And we'll come back to your nomadic lifestyle in a little bit because you're circumnavigating the globe on a constant basis. But at the same time, what you just said was turning what was a cost center into a potential significant profit center. And you're looking at iterating on that over and over again. I mean, you have this tree structure of what invisible. Can you describe your vision of where invisible is going in terms of the baby companies that you're spawning in the process?

• 46:54Speaker 04

  Yes. So, well, let's just complete the story with Mark and then we'll go to the demo I want to give at Abundance 360. So, so he's starting Zero Hiring. We own zerohiring.com. We're getting ready to launch. And he, I met this guy about a year ago, this guy named Sam Gibson, who was a British guy, and he had built and sold an RPO company, a recruitment process outsourcing company. And, and he had made about, you know, he'd made, he'd made meaningful, you know, return on that business, but he was, he was an entrepreneur that would still felt like the industry should be

• 47:35Speaker 04

  disrupted. So I introduced him to Mark Gray and Mark hired him and to basically build our external revenue. So by the end of the year, I think we're going to do $3 million run rate from our hiring as a service business from external clients. So invisible is no longer the only client of Mark and his team. They have revenue and it's already profitable. And so I'm pushing them to scale that business because next year, by the end of the year, they could be at 10 million plus revenue. And, and then they should be able to grow at 100% plus growth rates for many years until they're over 100 mil run rate. And so the demo I want to give at Abundance

• 48:15Speaker 04

  360, and, you know, I don't know if we'll be ready by next year, but if not, it'll be the year after. I want to go on stage and take Sam Altman's, you know, thing that he talks about, which I've been talking about for a decade too, is the one person unicorn. You know, could you have one person or a very, very small team build a billion dollar business without having to hire a huge finance team, a huge sales team, a huge operations team, a huge marketing team, a huge people team? And I would love to be able to build a business in an hour onstage. And, you know, we can source the idea from the audience, buy the domain, and then basically create, you know, delegate all the operations to Invisible.

• 49:00Speaker 04

  And we'll have hiring as a service run by Zero. And we have a, basically, a consulting business called Descendancy. That's our McKinsey Bain BCG competitor. So that'll run all the strategy and the advisor program and shareholder relations. We're building a marketing and design agency called Rad. So Rad will do all, it'll be our marketing team and our design team. And we have a few more that we're incubating. You know, eventually we'll have sales as a service and finance as a service. Unlimited Financial Services will be the name of, we just hired the CEO for that. And so, and that'll be our KPMG, you know, PWC, Deloitte, and EY competitor.

• 49:43Speaker 04

  And so, you'll, you'll basically have all the functions of your business outsourced. And you won't need to hire anyone other than the core team generating the core IP that are truly asymmetric, nonlinear, high-leverage founders. And I think this will create a new era in entrepreneurship. Because it will, it will change, you know, the, the idea of what it means to be on a team. So right now, the assumption is if you're only on a team, if you are a full-time W2 employee. But what if, we hold this as our standard of excellence as a vendor,

• 50:25Speaker 04

  is when our clients forget that we're not on their team. When, when, when, when, when they, we are so integrated in the, in their company and their processes. When we're so aware of their strategy and their goals and their OKRs. When we're able to add that kind of nonlinear value that they're like, yeah, Invisible's on the team. Like, you know, that's, I think, how Grace feels at OpenAI, like she's on the team. So. That's the, that's the, that's the goal is like, what if the majority of your team members are actually vendors? And you don't even care. It's just osmotic. Right now, only 10% of work is outsourced. By the end of the century, I think it could be 50 to 90%.

• 51:08Peter Diamandis?

  It's the speed, the speed of innovation, the speed of creation, the speed of problem solving, the agility.

• 51:18Peter Diamandis?

  If you were going to go back in time to the Francis I met 15 years ago. You're just getting started on Everest and give yourself the most, you know, distilled advice you could do. What would that be?

• 51:42Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 51:46Peter Diamandis?

  You're like back in time.

• 51:48Speaker 04

  Buy me some time to think. Have you asked yourself this question? Like, what would you give young Peter?

• 51:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 51:53Speaker 04

  Would you mess up the multiverse? Like, would you?

• 51:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, let's create that.

• 51:57Speaker 04

  The consequence?

• 51:58Peter Diamandis?

  Let me answer that question. So I think, first of all, young Peter went after medicine to make his parents happy versus what I wanted to do, right? Early on, which was space.

• 52:17Peter Diamandis?

  I want to jokingly say, you know, buy Apple and Amazon and Google early on when it's, but I, I think it was really focus on the core business and building something that is profitable and generating value and, and create, create something that's real versus building pie in the sky.

• 52:48Peter Diamandis?

  My early ventures in space were such, you know, insert $100 million here. And work on something for a long time and eventually build it versus start generating real business and revenue on day one and then build upon a profitable, ongoing business. It's one of the biggest challenges in the space business, the amount of capital required to get to a point where you're actually able to achieve orbital velocity, so to speak. And that was a very, very different. So how do you balance that moonshot desire at the same time that you want to build a real business early, right?

• 53:28Peter Diamandis?

  In that juxtapositioning, for me, I finally got clarity about you need to get to revenue early, start a team that's working together and generating capital and generating profits, and then get a clear roadmap from there to your moonshot. But don't start at the full moonshot level.

• 53:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:52Peter Diamandis?

  For me, that was an important insight. How about you? What was it? What failed your lessons? What lessons would you bring back?

• 54:01Speaker 04

  So I mentor and invest in, we started an investing program, and we'll get to that in a second. Visionary Ventures is the name of our investment arm. And as we're starting to invest in other entrepreneurs, and I'm starting to mentor younger entrepreneurs, I'm finding myself in this strange position of giving advice. But I still think of myself as a white belt and as a beginner. Beginners, and I hope I never lose that. You want to be in a beginner state of mind all the time to really perceive the world and learn the lessons that are all around us all the time. And then, like a good college essayist, I'm going to challenge the premise of the question,

• 54:42Speaker 04

  which is, if I had, even if I gave myself a, almost like a I know Kung Fu matrix download, and I could somehow download all the things I've learned in the last 15 years, that would kick off another branch in the multiverse, right? It would be a parallel universe where that Francis would go off to do different things. And there's something beautiful about the adversities, the tragedies, the things that I thought were so terrible at the time, like my first business failing, right? You know, like I was really beat up about that, but actually it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. And or us invisible failing to raise a series A because VCs thought it could never become a scalable company. That was also one of the best things that could have ever happened. Absolutely.

• 55:26Speaker 04

  No, no way that we'd be 70% owned by the team. And so you you sort of mess up the, you know, the butterfly in the cocoon, you know, needs to struggle to to become the butterfly. It's cliche, but it's true. That being said, I have three books that I recommend entrepreneurs read. These are like our three business bibles. The first is Outsiders by Will Thorndike, and he was the last investor in our company. And he studied Berkshire Hathaway. He studied seven other companies, General Dynamics, Washington Post, a company called Teledyne, and these are companies most people have never heard of. And the first page is a stock chart comparing their collective performance to the S and

• 56:11Speaker 04

  P 500 over time and to the most famous CEO that everyone had heard of, Jack Welsh and his performance over time. And it's just like a hands down, no contest crush fest. Like they absolutely crushed it. And and he says the way they did it is they understood how to generate capital and increase capital generation in their businesses over time. And they understood how to allocate capital. And he doesn't call it the sovereignty game, but basically, most of the principles of what we've codified as the sovereignty game are in that book. Right? And so I think from reading that book and from our other experiences, we're trying to sort of extend it and write the sequel, so to speak. And and that's why we're we have more and more clarity on what the sovereignty game looks like. But none of the businesses that he talks about in that book are technology companies.

• 56:56Speaker 04

  And so, you know, when I was first introduced to Mr. Thorndike, like that was the, that was my pitch. It's like, I want to build the first sovereignty game business in the technology industry, you know? And so that's the first book. The second book is Seven Powers by Hamilton Helmer. And this is a book about how to defend a business from competition. And the seven powers are scale economies, network effects, switching costs.

• 57:25Speaker 04

  Cornered resources, counter positioning, process power, and branding. And a business could, in theory, develop all the powers, but what really matters is which one you're going to be able to get to first. And if you can phase into power before your competitors, you have a barrier. And he makes you very aware that like, we usually talk about benefits, like there's so many benefits to using invisible. But what actually matters is barriers, which is why can't, you know, people solve that problem themselves or use some other company to solve that problem? Why do they need to use you? Why are you the only source of that supply? And those barriers end up creating the enterprise value over time.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  And he tells some great stories, and the Netflix blockbuster story is one of the main ones that really stuck with me.

• 58:15Speaker 04

  And then the third is Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen.

• 58:22Speaker 04

  And the Innovator's Dilemma is of the three books, it's actually the most subtle and nuanced of the books because the Innovator's Dilemma shows up in a whole bunch of different ways. And a really good example is actually Infinity. So you asked me earlier, what does our corporate structure look like?

• 58:40Speaker 04

  Our corporate structure is basically my sort of PhD thesis about how to solve the Innovator's Dilemma. That is the challenge that we're trying to solve as a company because we don't want to lose the entrepreneurial magic and we don't want to stop doing zero to one innovation as we scale. But scale is the enemy of innovation in most companies. And so you can understand how this works from a numbers perspective, actually. If by the end of the year, we hit our targets and we do, you know, we're at a 250 to 300 mil run rate, and these new businesses, I started an incubator called Infinity last

• 59:20Speaker 04

  January, and they're, you know, the incubator's a business and there's seven businesses inside of it, and each of them has CEOs. And by the end of this year, collectively, they're tracking for $10 million run rate. But that's only one, you know, that is a, that is like 3% of the overall group revenues or less. It's just, it's such a small percentage of the overall revenue, seemingly it doesn't matter. But every year you play out the story, this incredible dynamic occurs. So Invisible's growth rate because of physics will slow down even though, even if we continue growing at an incredible rate.

• 1:00:02Speaker 04

  Because, you know, let's just say next year we grow to 500 million of revenue and the year after that we grow to 850 and the year after that we go to 1.2, the year after that we go to 1.6 and then 1.9. You know, eventually you slow down your growth rate over time. As long as you, like last year we were at 300%, this year 150 was the goal, next year 100 is the goal, then it becomes 80 and 70 and 60 and 50 and 40 and 30. As long as you stay above 25, you're actually in legendary performance territory if you can maintain that over 20 years, right? That's what Apple did, Amazon did, Berkshire did, all the companies that you've heard of as legendary businesses, they stayed at 25% plus compounding over decades.

• 1:00:46Speaker 04

  And that's why my favorite website is mathisfun.com/compoundinterestcalculator. If you really play with the compound interest calculator, it's mind blowing what 25% does over, you know, 20 years.

• 1:00:59Speaker 04

  But these new infinity companies, even though they're only like 2% of our revenues this year, you know, next year they're going to grow at over 100% and they're going to stay at over 100% a lot longer. As the big business matures and the growth rate slows down, the small businesses will be able to stay at hyper growth, super high growth rates and will be able to piggyback on the success of the big business, which will lift the group average. But the only way you can do that zero to one innovation is you have to have separate structures. You have to put people in separate boxes, you have to ring fence them and, and create these separate businesses with separate cap tables. And so the way we've done it is the CEO of a new company inside of our, inside of our

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  incubator gets a path to owning 25% of that business. The team, the employee stock option pool, has a path to 25%. And we, for the first 5 million into the business, are getting 50% of the business. And control over the business and we're networking all these businesses together. So there are AirPods, iPhone, iPad, MacBook. It's operations as a service, hiring as a service, strategy as a service, sales as a service, finance as a service. That's, that's what we're doing. But that structure, you know, allows those, that board, that CEO, that team to focus on growing that business without too much interference or distraction from this big company. And it gives them the resources they need.

• 1:02:29Speaker 04

  If we try to do that sort of innovation inside of the big company, they would be crushed. They would not get any time, any attention, any energy, any money. And, and what a waste, you know, what a missed opportunity. So when you're dealing with, you know, too much opportunity, there's one solution, which I think is the sort of amateur solution, which is focus. Just pick one, one of the many opportunities and just focus on that because it's big enough. But the real pro move, which Christiansen gets at is set up separate businesses and each one of those businesses should focus. But, but that actually allows you to achieve the meta goal of going after the entire opportunity.

• 1:03:12Peter Diamandis?

  Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA? Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit and stool, and can tell you so much about your health. They've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members

• 1:03:55Peter Diamandis?

  critical health guidance, like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. You know, as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, after just six months of following Viome's recommendations, members reported the following, a 36% reduction in depression. A 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities.

• 1:04:35Peter Diamandis?

  Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com/peter. I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine, who's the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at viome.com/peter. Amazing. I love that. And it's true. And for a entrepreneur who is itching to be creative and to generate, it's a way of scratching that itch on your part, but having someone who's absolutely focused on the success of that core business.

• 1:05:18Peter Diamandis?

  I want to talk about your lifestyle, Francis. It's pretty extraordinary. Share with folks what it's like to be. You're taking the role of founder and chairman, and Ben Plummer has taken the role of CEO. Was that easy to pull a CEO in? But before that, I'll speak to you. One moment, you're in Southeast Asia. The next moment, you're in Europe. Now, you're up in Vancouver. Do you own a home?

• 1:05:52Speaker 04

  No, I don't. I was living in New York, and then I put all my stuff in storage, and I became a nomad about a year ago. And I'm in a new city almost every week. And I'm going where the business is, which is everywhere. So there are opportunities in all these places. Like, there are so many great companies in Vancouver. Lululemon's in Vancouver. Arc'teryx is in Vancouver. Slack is in Vancouver. Hootsuite is in Vancouver. There's some new unicorns here. And so...

• 1:06:24Speaker 04

  If you if you come here and you get introduced to the right people and you host a dinner, like we had a wonderful dinner on Sunday night with deep conversations I'll never forget. And I'm now I'm going to be friends with these people for hopefully for the rest of my life. And and then I'll keep coming back and over time a community forms. And we we've been building these communities on WhatsApp. We call them mafias. So we have our Vancouver mafia now. We have our New York City mafia has like 300 people in it. And it's like a private social network we've built on WhatsApp. And we also have been adding our friends to, you know, business syndicates. So we added all of our investor friends to our investor syndicate and they shared deals. We add all our entrepreneur friends to our entrepreneur syndicate.

• 1:07:09Speaker 04

  We have a longevity syndicate. We have a AI syndicate and these these are our networks that we're building over time. And it's a way of creating a culture when you have a fully remote company with no office. If you think about what it would have been like to build a business like this in the 1980s. You know, I would be, you know, probably on Wall Street or or something with an actual office. And the way you know that you're making progress is that you're upgrading to a fancier and fancier office. And you have more and more floors in the building. You can actually meet all the people and shake their hands. And the way I know this is real is I'm in Buenos Aires and we have 111 people.

• 1:07:49Speaker 04

  And I've never been to Buenos Aires before, but all these people share our values, share the mission. I talk to them, I hear their stories, and that's how I know it's real. It's because I get dinner with them in person and not just on Zoom. And so, yeah, we're we have partners in all these places, agents in all these places, clients in all these places, and then advisors and board members and friends and allies in all these places. So I think of it as sort of like a global, you know, remote work phenomenon. This new new nomadic, you know, lifestyle is possible.

• 1:08:26Speaker 04

  And then I'm also having fun adventures like I, I, you know, went scuba diving in Costa Rica. I invited my parents like, you know, if you don't live anywhere, the people that you love, your friends, your family, they come to you and then you take your, you know, mom and dad's scuba diving for the first time or, you know, somebody, one of our board members and one of our clients are big mountaineers and they took me to go climb Mount Rainier a couple of weekends ago. So that was exciting. So you can, it's a, it's a challenging lifestyle because every variable in your life is changing except for you. So it forces you to get really deep into certain routines that you can take with you everywhere. For me, those are yoga

• 1:09:09Speaker 04

  and meditation and reading the classics, reading books by dead people. And, and I can do that anywhere, even in an airport. And then in terms of bringing in Ben as CEO and then Ben is CEO of Invisible and he's doing a great job. I'm, I'm so delighted and he's doing a better job than I would. And that's why I hired him. And I think that, you know, these four roles get confused. Founder, CEO, president and chairman. These are very different roles. The founder is often the, the, the soul of the business, the cultural and creative, you know, strategic force. And founders are usually kind of wild and, and I'm certainly wild.

• 1:09:54Speaker 04

  And it's actually tough for a founder to be both a revolutionary and a fiduciary. It's a very, they're very different yin yang, you know, parts. And sometimes, you know, you, you mature into it, but usually you start as a revolutionary, you become a fiduciary over time. The CEO is the person running the business. And so I, for years, I was basically stuck in my apartment in New York, grinding away, you know, endless amounts of calls and emails and Zoom calls and, and meetings. And, and you're, you're like a doctor that's on call 24/7/365 and, and, and because you're building the business brick by brick.

• 1:10:30Speaker 04

  And so your Monday meetings are like, you know, show me your OKRs, show me your Gantt charts, show me your budgets, where are we at on this, where are we at on that? And it's the E in CEO that's the hard part. It's execution, right? It's always executing. Then there's the president. The president is like on planes, kissing babies and building political alliances all around the world. And those relationships can turn, they start as friendships and they can turn into all kinds of things. They could become an advisor or a board member. They could become a client. They could become, you could do a joint venture with them. You start a company with them. They could become co-founders. You could hire them. They could, you know, you can invest in them. There's so many things you can do with these relationships, but that's what the president

• 1:11:12Speaker 04

  is doing, is holding the social capital of the organization and the loyalty and continuing to orient people towards the long-term vision. The chairman is sort of on the mountaintop, so to speak, and the chairman is focused on capital allocation, big decisions like should we buy a company or should we raise money or what have you? Governance, running boards and making sure there's accountability. It's a very adult role, being a chairman. You know, holding people accountable to results. You're responsible for hiring and firing all the way up to the CEO level. And you're responsible for incentives and pricing and compensation and for the sequencing of the roadmap of the business.

• 1:11:56Speaker 04

  And so, you know, in the beginning, when you start a company and there's only one person and you and your dog, right? You're all four of those roles and you're the janitor, right? Like you're all those, and then over time, you sort of slowly unbundle. And so, you know, maybe now we're unbundling the CEO role. We have Shah Brumad as CEO of Infinity. He's doing a great job, you know, almost three decades of tech-enabled services, executive and entrepreneurial experience at ABB and Arriba and other companies. And then under him, we have seven or eight CEOs that are all amazing. And a lot of these are early invisible people who've been with the company for, you know, in one case has been with me from the beginning, but others, you know, six years or something.

• 1:12:39Speaker 04

  And they've already earned their stock in invisible and now they want to do the zero to one journey again. And so they're there. And then over time, I'm probably going to hire more presidents because I don't know if this lifestyle is sustainable forever. I'm young, I'm turning 35 in two weeks. So I will, you know, I can do this for probably until I'm 40. But then at some point, we'll probably need to hire probably not just one president, but there might, there might be 12 presidents that are super high trust, high loyalty people that are doing this lifestyle. And then I'll be chairman and then I'll have to figure out how to escape out of that job. And it kind of is, it is the art of abstraction. We talk about this.

• 1:13:22Speaker 04

  Most people, if you're in an employee mindset, you don't want someone else to take your job. But if you're in an entrepreneurial mindset, you're actually trying to work yourself out of a job. You do it once, you do it 10 times, you do it 100 times, you master it, or you get as good as you can be at it, even if you're working on your weakness. And then you hire someone who's going to do it better than you. You train them, you manage them, and then you're abstracted. And then you do another job. But when you're in that abstracted place, for a short period of time, you're sitting in the void. You don't know what your job is anymore. You're staring at the ceiling. That void place is actually where all the ideas come from and all the values created. You're then doing the zero to one thing of doing, you know, you created a new job for

• 1:14:05Speaker 04

  yourself and you're doing it again, and then you hire someone to do it, and then you manage them and abstract up. And then you're managing a whole bunch of people and you hire someone to manage them. And then, you know, then you're managing managers and then you're managing executives and then, you know, then you're trying to hire a chairman. And there's a, there was a political theorist in the last century who said, "The sovereign governs in the state of exception." So as long as you're in a position to fire, which is something we don't like talking about. It's the brutal reality, though, of a hierarchy in business, then you are in control of the structure. And so I've been paying special attention to board governance.

• 1:14:49Speaker 04

  And so we have four directors. In theory, a majority of them could fire me. But these are people that are incredible people and they're so accomplished. One of them was the head of corporate development for, under Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer for decades at Microsoft, Charlie Songhurst, he's my vice chairman. And I've been on a call with him like every week for seven years and I trust him. And so you surround yourself with people that correct your blind spots. And those are the people that you ultimately trust to put a sword to your neck if you've lost your mind and you're doing the wrong thing. But that same accountability works downwards as well. So if I ever got to the point where we were hiring presidents and hiring chairman,

• 1:15:31Speaker 04

  there would have to be the similar accountability and that's sort of your way out. And eventually, hopefully, you just have the title of human. You're just Peter or you're just Francis and you dropped all the titles.

• 1:15:45Peter Diamandis?

  And you're judged for the value you brought to the world, your life, the life of those that you touched and the dreams that you have going forward. Francis, you've built an amazing company and I'm so proud of you as a friend. And thank you for the time that you gave us on stage at the Abundance Summit this year. And I know we had a huge number of our members interested in Invisible as a potential platform to help them operationalize their lives efficiently. I want to go there for our last few minutes here.

• 1:16:25Peter Diamandis?

  If someone is thinking about, well, how do I use Invisible to automate and to operationalize?

• 1:16:33Peter Diamandis?

  What's your advice to them? How do they get started?

• 1:16:35Speaker 04

  Well, everyone quotes you now, Peter, and calls Invisible the easy button.

• 1:16:39Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:16:40Speaker 04

  So, most businesses are hearing about all these advances in AI and automation, and they struggle to figure out how to actually use that in their business. So Invisible's the easy button for figuring out, how do I use automation? How do I use AI? How do I use, you know, sort of sci-fi operations? The best practices in operations in 2024? How do I use that to run this business? Or how do I, you know, use it to create a new capability? Or create a massive efficiency? And usually, I'm sure everyone in the audience is thinking about some specific problem right now in your business that you're stuck on and you're trying to solve, and it's coming up in meetings. That's the problem we want you to give us. We want you to give us the hard problems. And you can reach out, [email protected].

• 1:17:25Speaker 04

  Just send us an email or go to the website and, you know, can fill out a form and reach out. And we're pretty reachable. Like, you can reach out to me. Some folks reach out to me on LinkedIn, and I try to check that inbox and respond. Usually, I'll just say, you know, email me. I'm also accessible, [email protected]. Oops, I just gave out my email on a podcast. What am I gonna do? Drown an email?

• 1:17:47Peter Diamandis?

  And you are, and your team is amazing, just, you know, really responsive. I'm sort of like, you know, there's gotta be a thousand AI agents that are actually your team instead of the humans out there. But you're, they come with a passion of help and service. And again, if you don't mind, just rattle off the clients that you've served over the last two or three years. So people understand the scope and quality of who you're serving.

• 1:18:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, first, you know, the first big enterprise contract we got was DoorDash. And then that turned into Uber, Grubhub, Delivery Hero, Bolt, Rappi, Walmart.com, and then OpenAI, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Coher, AI21, Character AI, Perplexity.

• 1:18:41Speaker 04

  And then, you know, now we're working with some, you know, big names in the finance industry, some of which I can't say, that are like tier-one private equity firms. And and and others that I can like we've done work with NASDAQ and our can vest and others so it's it's been an incredible journey. It's just also the dawn of time, you know, for for for AI and automation and and and for our business.

• 1:19:09Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing, amazing. And again, on on social, they find you where?

• 1:19:15Speaker 04

  Find me on LinkedIn, probably the best place. Francis Pedraza, F R A N C I S P E D R A Z A.

• 1:19:21Peter Diamandis?

  Or otherwise, you know, look out the window if you happen to be, you know, in Costa Rica or or in Indonesia or someplace in on climbing some mountain, you might find Francis there. Is you're a virtualized probability function on planet Earth for the most part.

• 1:19:39Speaker 04

  I'm like a ghost. Yeah, we have 150 people in Kathmandu and I'm going to Nepal for my first time this July. So there you go. Like, I'll be anywhere.

• 1:19:47Peter Diamandis?

  Incredible. Thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for your friendship.

• 1:19:52Speaker 04

  Thank you. I'm honored. I'm truly honored by our friendship and by your loyalty over time. You know, you saw me through not just one failure, you know, but like a long journey. And you continue to believe in me and that that's, I think, is why so many entrepreneurs trust you.

• 1:20:07Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, buddy. Thank you.

• 1:20:20Speaker 05

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